25+ must-have WordPress plugins

WordPress plugins are coming out all of the time, right and left. Every day, they’ve got new ones in the WordPress plugin repository for the curious developer to check out.

Over time, your average designer or developer will end up with a list of their favorites. Usually, they’re plugins that solve common problems, are up-to-date and well-maintained, with good support. With that in mind, we’re sharing a list of some of the best plugins out there.

Disable Comments

Disable Comments does… well… that. But instead of disabling comments for a single post, you can disable them for an entire post type, remove all comment-related fields for a post-type on the editing screens, and more. If you install it on a multi-site installation, you can disable comments for an entire network.

WP Maintenance Mode

Let your site’s visitors know that you’ll be back, and do it in style. Or let them know about your new site that’s still in the works. Either way, this splash screen comes with a visual editor, background images, optional countdown clocks, email forms, social links, and more.

BackupWordpress

BackupWordpress will do just that. It can back up your entire website, both the files and the database, on a schedule of your choosing. The free version will only back up files to your own server. The paid version supports Dropbox, Google Drive, FTP, and so much more.

Yoast

Ever-popular, WordPress SEO by Yoast helps you manage all of the little details required to rank relatively well in search engines. But not only does it handle the little details like inserting meta tags, it helps to evaluate your blog posts and gives you advice on making them more search-engine-friendly.

Instagram Image Gallery

Showcase your own Instagram photos, or grab all of the photos under any given hashtag, with this plugin.

Google Analyticator

Display your Google Analytics data right on your WordPress dashboard with Google Analyticator instead of logging in to the app every time.

ShareThis

Pretty much the ultimate post-sharing plugin. This plugin lets you add buttons for all the major social networks, share posts with other via e-mail, add the article to social bookmarking sites, and more.

SlideDeck2

Create a content slider that can feature more than just images, or links to your own WordPress posts. SlideDeck2 can handle content from Flickr, Youtube, Pinterest, and more to create sliders out of almost anything.

HTML5 jQuery Audio Player

Add this audio player to your site. Whether you want to play just one track, or a whole playlist, this plugin integrates a simple jQuery-based audio player that works on all modern browsers.

Jetpack

Jetpack comes from Automattic, the company that makes WordPress. It integrates a number of features that, while popular and useful, don’t belong in the WordPress core. These features include analytics, Markdown support, enhanced security, custom CSS, and many, many more. Each feature is a separate module, and can be activated or deactivated at will.

WP eCommerce

Start selling stuff through your WordPress site with WP eCommerce! Take advantage of the plugin’s built-in PayPal integration, or work with Express Checkout, Strip, or Authorize.net to collect payments from anyone, anywhere.

WP Mobile Detector

If you’re having trouble finding a responsive theme that works how you want it to, consider this plugin, which automatically recognizes mobile devices, and switches to a mobile theme for them.

Shareholic

More sharing buttons, this time with attractive, rounded-corner squares! Add this plugin to add all of the sharing buttons you’ll ever need on your blog posts.

Paypal for Digital Goods

Easily sell digital goods via PayPal. You can use it to sell any number of goods on the same page, using the PayPal for Digital Goods payment gateway.

Simple Membership

Protect your content, if you only want site members to see it. This way, you can keep things in a private group, or sell site memberships, or what-have-you. This plugin is compatible with multi-site installations.

WPtouch Mobile Plugin

Like WP Mobile Detector, this plugin detects when a user is on a mobile device, and presents them with a customized mobile theme instead of the default WordPress theme. There’re a few themes to choose from, with plenty of customization options.

Easy Pricing Tables

Need to put a price table on your site? Wanna do it fast? This plugin does that.

Manual Image Crop

Is WordPress’ automatic cropping not getting the job done? Do your images just not look right? Well, crop it yourself, right in your browser, with this handy little utility.

W3 Total Cache

If you want to speed up your WordPress site, and save bandwidth, then caching is the way to go. W3 Total Cache handles it so well that they boast users like AT&T, Mashable, Smashing Magazine, and many others.

iThemes Security

iThemes Security comes with a number of automatic protection options that fix common security holes. Each is easily activated with the click of a button, and the plugin itself will alert you of potential security problems.

WooCommerce

Completely transform your WordPress site into an online store. WooCommerce is powerful, extendable, and can support just about any payment method imaginable.

Disqus

Easily integrate the Disqus third-party comment system just by installing a plugin. It automatically replaces the default comment section.

Login LockDown

Limit the number of times someone can unsuccessfully attempt to log in to your WordPress admin with this plugin. This is done to prevent brute-force hacking attempts.

WP Flexible Map

Add Google Maps to your pages and posts with a simple shortcode. Specify your desired location in one of three different ways, and off you go!

Google Typography

If you tend to get lost in CSS files, but you want to change your theme’s font, leave the CSS alone. Just add the Google Typography plugin. It allows you to select from Google’s catalogue of web fonts with a list. Then you just have to pick the font size and color.

Frizzly

Frizzly adds social share buttons, not on posts, but when you hover over individual images. A great plugin for sharing images on photo blogs and other image-oriented WordPress sites.

Easy Digital Downloads

Another plugin for selling digital downloads. Where PayPal for Digital Goods is light, however, Easy Digital Downloads comes with plenty of features, including a full shopping cart, a variety of payment gateways, extensions, and many more.

TablePress

If you display a lot of tabular data on your site, take it to the next level by using TablePress. This plugin generates advanced tables with sorting options, advanced structure editing, and each table is its own entry in a custom post type, for more customization options.

WP Importer

You will need this plugin at some point, so it deserves a mention. basically, it allows you to import content from a local dev installation of WordPress, or move content from one domain to another, or any other use you can think of.

Picking up from where we left off, we need to start by creating some HTML to display the data we’ve stored in the $results variable. You can always modify this to suite your project. I’ll be using a table structure. <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"/> <link href="styles/theme.css" rel="stylesheet"/> <title>PHP & MySQL</title>\ </head> <body> <div id="wrapper"> <table> <thead> <th>Title</th>...

In the first two parts of this series, we created the data layer that will hold the polling data and established methods for setting the variable values and reading from the database tables. In this part, we will build the methods that will write new polls and answers to the tables. The addPoll method adds a new record to the devdrive_polls table and returns a Boolean value that signals if the record was added successfully. function addPoll($aArgs) { // add a poll record $sql = "LOCK TABLES devdrive_polls...

A SQL injection is a common programming error the consequences of which can be really devastating. Many successful hacking attacks start when a hacker discovers a vulnerability that gives an opportunity to inject SQL code. When an SQL injection occurs, the structure of an SQL query is compromised and as a result you are left at the mercy of the potential hackers. If there is a vulnerability found, hackers can exploit it to gain access not only to your site and database but in extreme cases also to your corporate...

So far we've created some basic PHP pages and added some simple authentication. Today we're going to going to build on that by adding database support. This will allow us to add proper authentication to our application and start saving tasks. I should also note that I am currently writing PHP in-line and not using functions (or object orientated PHP) I will tidy this up in the next tutorial and spend more time explaining it and what it's benefits are. Last week ... Last week we installed XAMPP, so you should...

In our last session, we looked at the process of entering information on ad banners and ad clients, as well as generating ad activity reports. This week, we examine how to retrieve a random banner ad. We will also learn how to delete, activate and deactivate ads and clients. The getRandomAd() function retrieves a random ad by using the PHP rand() function. The function returns the ad’s primary key ID, client ID, title, URL and redirect path. The function also updates the activity table for this banner...

In our last PHP Ad Tracker lesson, we constructed the database tables for our ad banner application. Now we are ready to construct the data object that will hold the variables and functions that will display, add, edit and delete the data in those tables. Once we name all of the variables and functions, we will start applying the code to them. Variables: The data object class will hold two variables: one to hold the banner ad ID number from the ads table, and one to hold the database connection information....

In the previous lesson, we examined the basic functions of our banner ad tracking system, including the retrieval of records for both banner ads and advertisers. In this lesson, we will look at the functions responsible for generating reports and manipulating the data in the ads table and advertiser table. The getClientsList() function retrieves active client records and sorts them alphabetically by client name: function getClientsList() { // get clients from db $sql = "SELECT ad_client_id,...

Introduction ... I’m going to tell you a story, its about love, death and re-birth... Or something In the beginning there was a young html element called <table>. He had one purpose in life, to display data and life was good. But before long though he had been corrupted, his masters used him to define layout and structure. Things he was not originally designed to do, and so began the dark ages of web design. Then one day, there came a young knight called CSS, and with him he brought light to designers...

About

DeveloperDrive.com is a blog about web development from the makers of the popular web design blog WebdesignerDepot.com
Founded in 2011, we focus on the latest trends, tutorials, opinion articles as well as tips and tricks to empower our readers to become better web developers.